THE PROFESSOR AND THE VICE PRESIDENT

Joe Biden gave the first lecture in the name of Jim
Soles at the University of Delaware. Naturally.

It was the intersection of the foremost Delawareans
of their day in their intertwined fields, the professor
and the vice president, the political scientist and the
political practitioner.

The combination was pure electricity in Mitchell Hall on the Newark
campus, where Soles taught and Biden went to college. It
attracted a dazzled crowd of 650 people, who
will be able to say they were there on the day Vice
President Joseph R. Biden Jr. inaugurated the James R.
Soles Lecture on the Constitution and Citizenship.

The lecture was conceived as an annual event in
remembrance of Soles, who died last year at 75, on
Constitution Day, commemorating the date the Framers
rose from the convention, their work finished in
Philadelphia on Sept. 17, 1787. This one was
actually on Friday, the 16th.

Ruffles and flourishes would not have been out of
order. There was the vice presidential seal on the
lectern, along with a full house giving cheers and
standing ovations and a stroboscopic effect as flashes
of light accompanied picture taking.

Jack Markell, the governor was there, and so were Tom
Carper, the senator Biden still calls "Tommy," and Chris
Coons, the senator who sits in Biden's old seat.

What a way to memorialize a compact-sized professor,
known for his wisdom and his easy counsel, for the
carnation in his lapel and his love of jaunty
conversation over a glass of bourbon.

"He liked a little pomp," said Catherine Soles
Pomeroy, his daughter, with a merry flash of the
distinctive Soles twinkle.

As much as this moment was the first lecture in the
First State, it is ironic that Soles and Biden were not
from here. Soles came from Florida by way of the
University of Maryland to teach, and Biden arrived as a
kid from Scranton.

Not that it would ever be questioned that Biden and
Soles are True Delawareans. They have sculpted this
state, as it sculpted them.

They had much in common, although neither was part of
the other's inner circle. They were two Democrats who
came of age politically during the turbulence of the
Days of Rage and Flower Power, the Vietnam War and
Watergate, civil rights, women's rights, early gay
rights, the youth vote and a zany concert called
Woodstock.

It was not a time for the sidelines. Biden ran for
the Senate in 1972 and won, and Soles ran for the House
of Representatives in 1974 and lost, and it has made all
the difference.

Biden was on his way to the highest office ever held
by a Delawarean, and Soles was on his way to an
astounding legacy of students, who became governors, a
senator, judges, state Cabinet secretaries, aides,
campaign volunteers and plain good citizens.

Biden showed what Soles meant by joining the mourners
at Soles' funeral, which fell on the freestanding day
between Election Day and Return Day 2010.

Here on the day of the lecture, Biden was in a good
mood. Not only did he have a crowd in utter silence
absorbing every word of his for almost an hour, but he
was also donating his senatorial papers, all 36 years of
them, to the university library.

The place was in stitches as Susan Brynteson, the
vice provost in charge of the library, noted that only
14 senators have ever served longer than Biden, and he
crossed himself.

Biden was at his most lyrical. He recalled
crystalline moments on campus -- learning of John
Kennedy's assassination as a student in 1963,
campaigning for the Senate as a 29-year-old in 1972,
giving a consoling speech after September 11 in 2001.

"Yeats wrote a poem, 'Easter 1916.' In that poem,
there was a line describing his Ireland that, quite
frankly, it better describes the world and America today
than Ireland in 1916. He said, 'All changed, changed
utterly/A terrible beauty is born,'" Biden said.

He paid deep tribute to Soles. "Of one thing I'm
certain. Jim Soles was a believer, as I am, that
politics is not a dirty word. At the end of the day,
politics is the only way a community can govern itself,"
Biden said.

"Politics is what those 50 gentlemen who met 224
years ago participated in."